Tigranes

Alright, purchased - you guys better be right. I think I'll be reasonably satisfied if the combat keeps varying, I do like the story/etc.

Tried Bastion demo. It's pretty and the narrator's cool, but I don't know if I want to pop down $15 for what I expect will be the same thing over and over again for a few more hours and then over very quickly. The combat itself was rather dull. Anyone else played it? Itching for a new game, at this rate I'll be getting Skyrim on Day 1 and dealing with all the silliness of an unmodded Bethesda game.

Wouldn't that cause massive problems long-term where you get the Undercity and Overcity of Europe, and the latter is forced to gradually shut down all immigration (except for the dirty work they need done), holding poorer and needier countries to ransom for their resources, etc?

Have you levelled up enough to unlock all your abilities? You have three stances. In each stance, 1, 2 and 3 will correspond to three different abilities. At the beginning of the game, you will only have 1 ability in each stance. Defense is a stance in itself that you hold. The healing ability is in your defense stance - so it is your first ability (1) when you are in your defense stance. Eventually, you will have all 9 abilities, so that whether you are in one of the 2 normal stances or in the defense stance, your hotkeys will change to show different abilities for 1,2 and 3. I'm not sure what exactly you mean by things swapping when you upgrade your attributes, but if everything's working, that's how it should look.

Thieves/rogues weren't terribly useful in any Bio game, ever - sadly. I think BG2 still did it best since you could at least have some fun with scouting, traps, assassination, backstabbing, kits, Use All Items HLA, etc. Obviously, in KOTOR and NWN flanking goes out the iwndow because there is zero sense of positioning (how can you when people skate around the terrain half the time and you have no depth perception in the KOTOR camera?). BG1 thieves weren't essential but they at least had a bit more to do. Otherwise, I can't refute Volourn, because I can't refute what he says he experienced in his personal playthroughs. But I don't mind.

Excellent. It looks very samey, but hopefully they will not go half-arsed and make some real improvements to the formula.

Perhaps the bad thing for him is that a large portion of people who share that opinion are just not inclined to vote Republican. :/ (that doesn't mean they're all committed Dems, btw.)

I clicked stuff far, far less in KOTOR than BG1 because everything happened by themselves, because thats the only way that combat system can work with that camera. I clicked and mashed more buttons in Jade Empire, but I was bored half the time because there was no thought involved. At least in BG1 I had to think about what I was doing more. But good job selecting a single means of comparison and then running all the way to China.

Volourn's right, it doesn't work that way, and BG1 also lacks a lot of things BG2 has. Separate from all that, BG1 is a fun game, it has loot, character building, combat and progression that makes it fun to play multiple times, and it has a nice charm in terms of setting, art direction, etc. With a couple of mods to bring it a bit up to date (BG2 UI, widescreen) it is still fun to play. That's why it is a good game. Whereas there's no reason to play KOTOR again unless you really, really love the story, since its combat is a lot more Press A To Win than DA2.

Not much time for anything else but enjoying PES2012. It's very good and a clear improvement from 11, though the goalkeepers are still retarded. In modern PES defenders and goalkeepers go completely haywire if the ball is bouncing around in the 6-yard box, and if you don't keep a cool head (and get lucky with deflections and animation ****ups) it's an own goal parade. Apparently theres a patch coming promising to improve keepers - I'm also playing with all the keepers' attributes cranked all the way up. Otherwise, though, the animations are decent, the ball weight/trajectory feels very good and the unassisted passing really comes into its own this year - you really do a lot of mispasses, overhit/underhit, and the success of your through balls depends not on hitting the pass button at the right moment, but just as much on the movement you then make with the runner - it's possible to muscle off the defender and get to it first, or, of course, get a bad first touch and screw up the chance. Equally, as a defender, if you think you'll get to that through ball first and do nothing you might end up on your arse. The AI is also a lot more unpredictable in attacking, and it's much harder to stop them without fouling - I suspect that in part, they change direction the moment you decide to tackle (though you can certainly tackle them if you time it right). All in all satisfied. Deus Ex 3 might deserve a second playthrough at some point, but the intro areas are so boring.

Talking to a couple of journals. One seems fairly close to being accepted, another will require some work and painful refiddling first. Which is not cool because (a) half of my material is back in NZ and (b) I wrote this nearly 2 years ago and if I did this now I'd have done it differently from the ground up. It would also have been nice if I could have done this before starting school here, but such is life.

Meh. I think the "looks like Fallout" has been more or less exhausted with FO1,2,3,NV and various DLCs (even if large chunks of it was itself deviant from that definition). At that point, you either close the series and call it a day (which won't happen economically speaking), or move on and really adapt the Fallout world to new subsettings. That is actually a much healthier way to 'reinvent' Fallout than try to recreate the old setting exactly then make funky changes to it.

FIFA is definitely a lot better now, but every time I try them, it's fun for 10 games then it's all downhill from there. It just does not feel like a real football game because they don't design it to feel like real football. You score 6 goals. Players randomly break out with flying scissor shots to 'spice it up'. The same pass gets the AI every time. PES has been in the doldrums but '11 was very good and I was impressed with the '12 demo... I'll let you know how it is, I'm just installing an option file to get the kits right. It does depend on how 'casual'/serious you are, though.

Tried to buy PES 2012. Even though it is now released in US, I can't find the PC version anywhere. I discover that although the press release actually states PC as a platform, North America never actually got a PC version release. I then discover that I can't buy the UK version as their release is in October. I also discover that I can't even find a direct download version, not even through the company's own website which sells the other versions. I find French and other European retailers selling their versions, but as I try they region-lock their stores so I can't buy them, even though (a) the game is officially released in my region and (b) this leaves me with no legal means to purchase the game. Eventually, I had to (a) use a proxy server to approach the site, (b) then turn the proxy OFF so that I could pay with my credit card. The whole process also robbed hours of my life. Truly, in the age of piracy, you'd think they'd bend over to make it easier for you to buy legally. But then, I still paid them, so kudos to 'em. Edit: On the upside, I now plan to play the game with commentators like: http://www.youtube.com/embed/m7vlaUkQ2dk

Solo Ironman Icewind Dale series sounds good. Though it'll be painful to have to never use so much loot...

Dragon Age? DAO was pretty good for that, but after 3 playthroughs that was it. I think what it had was very tight but the offerings were quite select - e.g. only about 30 spells, take out 10 not very useful ones...still, it was a good effort. I might try HOMM3 too, esp. since I think I can put that gog version on my phone. Not sure, though. I like the tactical combat stuff but e.g. in Age of Wonders I wasn't a fan of the strategic map.

Third TW2 playthrough kind of lost steam now I'm in the endgame. To be honest, I think one major reason we haven't had a highly replayable RPG for so long is that there is no replayability in the character development system (tied to loot/combat system/etc). Instead, a la Alpha Protocol / TW2 / etc we get what's meant to be story nonlinearity, which is nice when done well, but it kind of sucks nothing has replaced the IE games (or older ones) for that. The witcher I make in TW2 (or even 1) is really the same witcher every time, same with Jensen in DX3, Thorton in AP, and I'd argue there's not that much scope in FO3/NV either (partly due to the overabundance of points). It would be super awesome if the Elder Scrolls took this up properly and combine their big explorable world with truly differently-playing characters, but their system is just a complete mess.

He's in Japan.

To be honest, Dragon Commander looks bleh. Despite being suped up from the horrible version in Div2, dragon combat simply looks boring from the very beginning, while the various RPG/strategy elements just feel shallow and tacked on compared to a proper HOMM/AOW style game, or even King's Bounty. Perhaps I'll be proven wrong, but... Age of Decadence is the only indie RPG that's grabbed my attention for a while, though it never set out to be particualrly innovative. Planeswalker Games is dead (as long suspected, which sucks). Knights of the Chalice was good and the second one should be even better.

This is old news, but I've just found out I can use GemRB to play Torment, IWD & BG on my smartphone. Awesomesauce. Apparently bunch of other things are possible too, like dosbox.

TW2 ultra-graphics playthrough continues. Having played once each on each side, I've decided to go to Vergen again - the whole poisoner conspiracy investigation bit was the killer (and also, more funny characters) - reminds me of the awesomeness that was NWN2 OC's trial. Everything looks so good, except for a few areas where the lighting goes crazy and you get huge orangey bloom everywhere. Sadly, I doubt we'll see an RPG that looks better than TW2 for quite some time - DX3 doesn't compare and Skyrim won't, either.

Picked up my first smartphone in Sprint's new 4G Samsung Galaxy II. I've played with galaxies before and know I love them, this particular one is super-thin and 4G seems to work OK where I am (Philadelphia). Wondering what the easiest way is for me to put my music on there too.

I did finish the game a few days ago, and thought the ending was pretty decent (apart from the enemies, which were retarded... it's almost an RPG convention to have stupid, boring enemies at the end level.) But you do get a few good conversations with the major players, then get to make a pretty big decision. Sadly, you don't get much of a denouement in the ending narrative, and it doesn't really make up for the tepid, unimaginative plot throughout. I'll probably play once more to do a few things differently and use some combat stuff I didn't get to (*cough* typhoon *cough*), but certainly there's nothing in the story, characters or world that genuinely gets the heart racing.

Still reading, so this isn't a reflection on the entire article, but:

Meetings are designed to create problems, not solutions. If you're complaining that meetings make life harder for you, that's what they were always meant to do.